How to develop a truly great leadership team

Many leadership teams don’t live up to their potential.

I want you to think about your leadership team: Is it really operating at it’s true potential?

What I’m going to share with you is a way for you to take your leadership team from one that’s potentially disfunctional and not delivering, to a team that’s completely delivering results beyond what anyone thought possible.

I call it the Team Multiplier.

When you think about your leadership team and where it’s at at the moment, is it achieving it’s potential?

I help people in teams evaluate whether their team is achieving their potential. The answer is a spectrum.

I want you to think about the spectrum of your leadership team. Right at this moment. From at one end of the spectrum, delivering it’s results and delivering on it’s potential all the way through to the highest level of disfunction, infighting, not working together, and not achieving it’s potential.

When I think about leadership teams I think about literally the value they deliver to the business, and if the value they deliver to the business is less than or equal to what they’re paid, the salaries that those 8 or 10 people are paid, then they’re not a multiplier. If the value they deliver to the business is more than the salaries they are paid then they are a multiplier.

I find there’s five big problems that get in the way of teams being multipliers that deliver 5x or 10x value.

My job with my program is to try to take them from disfunction to delivering 5 or 10 times their value.

To do that I have to deal with these five problems.

First one is a traffic jam so everyone has their own idea of success. There’s not one single shared purpose and they’re all going in different directions and there’s a jam at the top.

Second is heroes rule and this is the idea that within that 8 or 10 people there’s two or three that are more important than the rest, and so everyone defers to them on decisions and there’s actually no real buy-in to the team and it’s purpose.

The third is a decision vacuum, so they do a lot of THIS (talking gesture) And not a lot of THIS (pointing). They don’t make many decisions and they don’t more forward.

The fourth is artificial harmony which is when everyone pretends they’re getting along but is stabbing each other in the back behind the scenes. We all know what that’s like and it gets in the way of work getting done.

The fifth is fun police which is that being in that team just isn’t fun. You turn up every day, they’re not your mates, they don’t have your back and it’s not very enjoyable.

So if you want to move in your leadership team from disfunction to results you’ve got to deal with these five problems, and the way I help people deal with them is through a really simple practical step by step approach using this framework.

I help them install two main things.

One is clarity. Right? And clarity is: That we’re clear on our mission.

And the second is teamwork: That you’re going to work together to achieve it.

Now let me give you an example of some of the projects that I’ll put in place around clarity and teamwork to create this multiplier.

The first one is, we work with the team on creating a shared purpose. A destination, a purpose, goals and a plan.

We’ll then make sure we’ve got the right people in the team. Have we got the diversity, capability and difference of style that enables that team to deliver 5 or 10 times value?

Have we got an execution rhythm? Both a monthly planning system and then a quarterly strategic planning system that enables the right things to get done?

And have we got trust? We pick one core behaviour that this team’s going to work on each month to increase it’s trust and work together better. And we use a framework called observe, aware & feedback to give each other feedback on those trust behaviours.

The fifth is we try and change the way each executive is using their time so that there’s more of the activities that move the needle towards profit, towards value on the business. Over time we’re moving closer towards their three year vision through using building blocks to get them there.

With the shared purpose what we’re trying to do is get rid of this whole traffic jam at the top.

With the right people in the team we’re trying to remove this whole problem with fun police and artificial harmony.

With the execution rhythm we’re making sure the decision vacuum has a rhythm to move forward.

With the trust, we’re getting rid of this whole heroes rule and making sure that all the team are working together towards a mission and they’re really committed to achieving it.

I want you to think about your team right now, your leadership team.Are they really truly achieving their potential?

If they aren’t a multiplier where they’re delivering more than it costs to have them in the business, ask yourself: Is it worth investing in both the clarity and the teamwork that’s required to get them to that level of delivering those results?

This is called the Team Multiplier framework, and its transformative for leadership teams.